On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 9:40 AM, C. Scott Ananian cananian@wikimedia.org wrote:
Fair enough. My point is just that we should stop and reflect that this is a major inflection point. Language choices are sticky, so this decision will have significant long-term implications. We should at least stop to evaluate PHP7 vs Hack and determine which is a better fit for our codebase, and do due diligence on both sides (count how many engineers, how many open source contributors, commit rates, etc). HHVM has been flirting with a LLVM backend, and LLVM itself has quite a large and active community. The PHP community has had issues with proper handling of security patches in the past. I'm suggesting to proceed cautiously and have a proper discussion of all the factors involved instead of over-simplifying this to "community" vs "facebook".
PHP is an open-source language with mature tooling and major community buy-in. Facebook has *promised* to turn Hack into an open-source language with mature tooling and community buy-in; almost none of that exists currently. Once it already does, a worthwhile discussion might be had about switching to Hack. Right now it would be incredibly irresponsible.
Also, making PHP a viable language for third parties is the core business model of Zend. Making Hack a viable language for third parties has absolutely nothing to do with the business model of Facebook. At any point they might decide it is a distraction they don't need. Comparing commit numbers is not really meaningful without knowing what fraction of those committers can disappear overnight if Facebook reconsiders its priorities.
IMO the more interesting discussion to be had is how little we invest into the technology our whole platform is based on. You'd think the largest production user of PHP would pay at least one part-time PHP developer, or try to represent itself in standards and roadmap discussions, but we do not. Is that normal?